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With the increasing number of first-generation students’ enrollment in recent years, assisting this group of students has been an important topic in recent educational research (see Ives & Castillo-Montoya, 2020 for a review). The purpose of this study was to explore differences in sense of belonging and academic engagement for different definitions of first-generation college students. In addition, my goal was to examine their moderating effects of first-generation status on the relationship between sense of belonging and academic engagement. In this study, first-generation college students were either self-identified or defined in terms of their parents’ educational attainment. A grouping variable was also created based on the overlap between the self-identified first-generation students and first-generation college students with neither parents having a bachelor’s degree. t-tests were used to compare the differences between first-generation college students and continuing-generation college students on scores representing sense of belonging at course and campus levels and four subconstructs of academic engagement (i.e., behavioral engagement, agentic engagement, cognitive engagement, and emotional engagement). Using multiple regression models, the moderating effects of different first-generation statuses were tested on the relationship between sense of belonging and academic engagement. This study included 579 undergraduate students from the University of Texas at Austin who participated in a subject pool for course credit. Results from this study indicated that sense of belonging at two levels were positively correlated with four subconstructs of academic engagement. The results also indicated that first-generation college students with different definitions scored differently on variables of sense of belonging at course and campus levels, as well as on four subconstructs of academic engagement. Finally, some moderating effects were found between variables of sense of belonging and subconstructs of academic engagement for different first-generation statuses.

This study expands on the growing body of literature on the emotional experiences of learning English as a second language outside English-speaking countries. This is an exploratory study that aims to answer the following three research questions: (1) How do Chinese college students experience shame differently for English learning in studying-related, test-related, and class-related situations? (2) How do Chinese college students from three different majors and years differ in their shame experiences of learning English in three academic settings? (3) Whether Chinese college students regard the emotional experiences of English learning as more positively or more negatively? A total of 143 Chinese college students recruited from Shanghai International Studies University in China, participated voluntarily in this study. These college students were from three different majors and all had studied English for more than 10 years. For the quantitative component, the modified version of Achievement Emotion Questionnaire (AEQ) developed by (Pekrun et al., 2005) was used to assess the shame emotions experienced by Chinese college students. For the qualitative component, interviews were conducted to provide supplemental and profound understanding of how Chinese college students perceive shame experiences in learning English as a second language, and how these experiences differed in class-related, learning-related, and test-related settings. Results indicated that Chinese college students experienced shame emotion in English learning differed significantly in class-related, learning-related, and test-related settings. They scored their shame experiences higher in learning-related setting than other two settings. However, statistics indicated that there was no difference of shame experiences for students from three majors across three academic settings. Quantitative results also revealed that college students from Shanghai International Studies University experienced more positive emotions than negative emotions when learning English in three academic settings. Qualitative findings from answers of four participants in interviews confirmed their relatively high scores in experiencing positive emotions. Chinese college students’ shame experiences in learning English as a foreign language were elaborately illustrated from participants’ answers to interview questions.